BLACK COWBOYS AND EARLY CATTLE DRIVES: On the Trails from Texas to Montana

After the Civil War, emancipated slaves who didn't want to pick cotton headed west to find work and a new life. Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving drove 2,000 longhorns across southern Texas blazing a trail to Bosque Redondo in New Mexico. By the 1870s, 25 percent of the more than 35,000 cowboys in the West were Black. Fully illus.